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by llamaimperative 746 days ago
We used mercury in fur clothing and lead in gasoline also because they were nontoxic.

We are seeing population-scale effects exactly identical to what we see in animal models and in Petri dishes. Hormone disruption, which you’d expect to see metabolic disorders (like obesity), changes in sexuality (in animals we see a reduction in sexual dimorphism — plausibly connected to gender dysphoria), and fertility problems.

We don’t know for certain this stuff is bad, but I am absolutely sure that your confidence is unwarranted.

3 comments

Don't talk too loudly about this stuff. You'll be roped in with the "Alex Jones" crowd because any talk like that implies biological determinism, which is deeply against the "acceptable ideology list" in our overton window.

God forbid if you connect the massively increasing youth LGBT identification rates to any biological or environmental factors - it must be 100% due to cultural change!

OP won’t be categorized as such, because they haven’t added some bullshit, which would make it immediately obvious that the argument is used only to back a prejudice. I quite rarely see an accusation where the prejudice is not obvious, and facts are used to just back feelings.
The trick is not being hateful of other people and transparently exploiting science to rationalize that hatred.
> Hormone disruption, which you’d expect to see metabolic disorders (like obesity)

I would suspect consuming multiples more dissolved sugar day and night and sedentary lifestyles way before hormone disruption. Especially considering reducing caloric consumption leads to losing weight.

I think most major problems in the world are both overdetermined and multicausal. If we spend our time trying to isolate “the” culprit before taking action, we’ll solve roughly zero important problems.
“ We used mercury in fur clothing and lead in gasoline also because they were nontoxic.”

Ah, yes. That nontoxic mercury not at all turning our hatters mad.